Pancake People and the Future of American Politics

This week’s readings did prove to be the most interesting yet I believe. It was an enlightening mix of the political blogosphere, Internet brain drain, and the benefits of podcasting. The article, Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics was especially interesting because of blogging’s prominent position in the recent presidential campaign race. The article highlighted the rise of blogging and its effect on American politics, while the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? brought much needed attention to the possible perils of Internet usage and its effects on literacy in both the young and old. Finally, the podcast of Greg Cangialosi speaking at Duke University was extremely educational, usable information that is paramount to the future of corporate and organizational communications.

We all should know by now that blogging is a consistent presence on the Internet and is continually evolving and finding its place in the corporate sector, financial industry, religious community and the political arena. As I read the article I filled margin after margin with notes to self and comments about how this article was so relevant to this past year’s presidential race. It’s as if the author knew what was on the forefront of American politics and she was giving us a sneak peak. There were two key points I read in this article. First I related the bottom up approach in digital convergence to the article when it stated “Blogs instead exert an indirect form of power, amplifying and channeling the pressure of netroots opinion upwards to pressure politicians and journalists”. That is such a key concept of connecting political blogging to digital media convergence. “It’s really a rising up” said Peter Daou who organized John Kerry’s presidential campaign blogging outreach in 2004. Blogging’s influence during a presidential campaign is indicative of its reach and effectiveness in American politics. Kerry’s campaign was the first time I ever participated in the political arena in an online capacity. I subscribed to his weekly and monthly messages to keep up with his platform and ideas. This brings me to my next point about this article. A consistent internet presence, some in the form of blogging, was a key part of Barack Obama’s success on his way to the White House. Compounded with other wisely planned grassroots activities, his netroots campaign gave him a distinctive edge over Clinton and eventually McCain, and his staff continues to use this avenue of communication during his presidency. The article stated “Blogs allow rank-and-file voters to pick the candidate to support in any given electoral race, influence his or her platform, and volunteer their time, money and expertise in more targeted and substantive ways”. I again participated in politics through the internet, but this time more interactively. I donated, left comments and volunteered my time because of his efforts. If Barack Obama’s campaign didn’t expose and use blogging knowledge to the fullest, I don’t know who did.

Nicholas Carr writes a telling article about Internet drain that is very accurate despite what some tech geeks and self-professed internet junkies may think. Although it won’t destroy us, the Internet is changing the way we think and process information. As we were just recently discussing in class, the ways children learn and their ability to read complex material is quickly changing. My theories about educating young people only touched the surface however. It wasn’t until I read this article that I realized its impact on adult literacy as well. As Carr states even he has a hard time reading lengthy articles and his constituent confessed to completely giving up on reading books altogether. I often resolved within myself while teaching fifth grade that most of the reading materials and textbooks that I learned from would no longer be appropriate to use now. When selecting short stories and books to read collectively in class, I would first look at the length of the story or chapters within a book. Anything over 3 pages and I decided against it. It’s not that I didn’t believe in my students, but I knew they would be on overload if we read longer material. To the contrary of this fact however, those same students could sit at the computer for hours on end surfing the internet for information and chatting on social websites. As Maryanne Wolf explains in the article, “…the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.” I truly believe this is the reason why a three year old child who cannot read yet can turn on a computer, participate in numerous games and activities on a computer and shut it down without knowing how to read a single word that comes on the screen. Literacy is fast becoming more and more about symbols and less about the alphabet.

This article also addresses a concept I believe is key in the idea of digital media convergence as it pertains to the Internet. The author writes “When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.” The internet is one aspect of digital media convergence, yet I believe it’s the most crucial aspect. The author goes on to say “…traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads…” This immediately made me think about whenever I’m watching USA Network. I can’t enjoy a half hour or hour program without a pop up from the bottom of my television informing me of what’s coming up within the next few hours or even the next few days. There are now even pop ups of the product that is sponsoring the show. I find those pop ups so distracting, but according to the author, the internet is designed to distract, so it seems like television has followed its lead.

The most difficult concept I had a hard time dealing with is the A-listers in the blogosphere and their attitude toward diversifying the blogging community. Two A-list bloggers that were interviewed gave me the distinct feeling, like stated in that article, that bloggers are just the new old boy group in politics. They seemed to have no sense of social responsibility for making the blogging community more diversified and that reminded me of the 1950’s south and the racist white men that controlled it. For Moulitsas to state that he and other bloggers shouldn't have to embrace an “affirmative action of ideas” was insensitive and hypocritical to his own belief of using blogging as the “ultimate tool of democratic participation.” Who is the democracy anyway? Is democratic participation only for well educated, techno savvy white men? Attitudes like his will widen the social gap that blogging was created to narrow.

This leads me to my questions of the week:

- Can blogging truly revolutionize politics if it’s controlled by young well-educated white men who are quickly becoming the minority in this country? Statistics show that colleges are predominantly attended by females.

- Will our education system realize the impact the Internet has on future literacy and learning styles and address it?

- Can we use blogging and podcasting to educate our educators about the future of learning?

These questions and others that I’m pondering are forming my ideas about my upcoming paper. I’m interested to research the effects be them positive or negative that increased internet usage will have on our education system and the way teachers approach classroom learning.

Collective Intelligence: Heaven on earth?

This week I enjoyed two additional readings about media convergence. I found the article The Reinvention of the World Wide Web to be very engaging. Its main intent was to encourage readers to consider redefining how we think about the World Wide Web and tend to define it by comparing it to print media. Hilf encourages us to expand our thinking past the concept of comparison and develop a new model to define the Web that encompasses its main components: accessible information and efficient communication.

Next, the chapter Spoiling Survivor from the text Convergence Culture, was equally engaging and enlightened me to the world of spoiling reality television season plots on the Internet. The chapter discusses the lengths and depths that spoilers go to involving modern technology to figure out the location, cast list and winner of each Survivor season. The chapter also details the concepts of collective intelligence, knowledge communities and the expert paradigm. Although I would not ordinarily be interested in the ins and outs of reality television, the chapter gives a intriguing look inside the spoiler community and an elitist sub-culture known as the Brain Trust that has emerged.

There were so many great tidbits of information that revealed itself to me in the readings, but if I had to narrow down to three, I would focus on the following:

• "Spoiling emerged from the mismatch between temporalities and geographies of old and new media." This I believe was a driving force behind the convergence culture as a whole. As the World Wide Web became more available and the everyday consumer learned to navigate this new source of information, the world became much smaller. As stated in the text, the three hour time difference between the East and West Coast in the United States became a window of opportunity for information to leak before it was supposed to in other time zones. Thus the concept of spoiler was born. The Internet's ease of use and overwhelming availability of information forced media producers to rethink their approach to content and play catch up to early adopters who found a new hobby of investigating industry secrets.
• Pierre Levy believed knowledge communities could restore true democratic citizenship as evident by the popular Survivor Sucks online community that collectively disseminated information and came to its conclusions. Hundreds and thousands of consumers formed global villages to vote and rule out insider information, and no one voice was louder than the other. Unfortunately, the elitist brain trusts formed within the knowledge community and began to only share what information they deemed was necessary and once again restored hierarchy to the newly formed knowledge culture. The brain trust closely resembles military factions and government.
• The third key point that stood out to me was the question: "Was spoiling a goal or a process?" I immediately thought of the definition of convergence when I read that question. The question resembled the concept of convergence being a process and not an end point. Is the merging of digital media and individual transition by industry or a collaborative effort by all media to survive and evolve? As we read in our week two readings, although it began as an individual process, it has become a collaborative effort and thus the concept of media convergence has arrived.

The most difficult concept for me to swallow was related to an aforementioned key point. Levy suggests that his model of collective intelligence is an "achievable utopia" and through small intimate experiences we'll learn to live within knowledge communities. That's a strong concept to suggest that only working collectively will bring about the ideal state of living. Although I agree that teamwork is much needed in our society, I'm reluctant to believe that it's the only way to bring about an ideal state of living, a utopia. Is the only way to achieve world peace through sharing our knowledge? I'm not convinced that this will produce heaven on earth.

The concept of playing is a one of the ways we learn hit a direct nerve for me and I can relate it to my everyday life. The preschool I direct engages our children through a curriculum called Creative Curriculum. Essentially it is built upon the precept that children ultimately learn through playing. It was refreshing to see that model being applied to adult learning as well and I definitely have personally seen the value in these concepts of reskilling and reorientation.

So as I conclude my thoughts for the week I'd like to leave you with a few thoughts to ponder. Is collective intelligence the way to achieve an ideal state of living? Will a hierarchy or gated knowledge community always emerge within a seemingly content culture? Is the collective participatory nature of any group enough to hold it together?

Electricity: The father of controlled chaos

I bet German physicist Otto von Guericke, English physicist Stephen Gray, Benjamin Franklin, Alessandro Volta, and George Simon Ohm didn't know their fascination with electrical currents would one day be the start of the controlled chaos of media convergence we today embrace as our beloved cable programming, world wide web, cell phones and video games systems? As Federman states McLuhan realized that the "effect of electricity and what he called 'all-at-once-ness' was implosive."

I found both readings fascinating, yet disturbing at the same time, to say the least. The introduction of Convergence Culture gives us a solid foundation to build our knowledge of the convergence platform by explaining the history or timeline of different types of media and how they relate. The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village snaps us into the reality of the multiple "digilives" many of us are leading with and without knowing. This article also eloquently revisits the concepts of acoustic versus visual space, but in a much easier to read format than our week one reading. There were several key ideas in the readings, but the three that stand out to me the most are: a) Our inability to shut out the effects of the Internet on our culture and society, b) the realizition of multiple digiSelves on the internet, and c) media convergence being more than a technological shift.

We learned that we cannot shut out the effects of the Internet on our culture and society. A prime example as stated in the text is the case of Senator Trent Lott who made racist comments that the conventional news media was going to ignore and not put a spotlight on it. We may never know why they weren't going to, but one thing we learned quickly as a result of the internet: Conventional journalists aren't the only ones with access to millions of "viewers". In this case, readers and writers of weblogs caught wind of the comments and decided it was newsworthy and began posting comments about the incident. With pressure and continuous focus from internet journalists, the mass media had no choice but to also feature the story and report on it in detail, and thus Senator Lott had to step down from his position.

The key idea that personally has had the most impact on me is the realization that many if not most of us have multiple digiSelves on the internet. As I began to read this section I thought of the multiple networking accounts I personally own and how different parts of my personality prevail on each site. The harsh reality sunk in that I have multiple digital personality disorder! I say that jokingly, but as Federman states "...manifestations of our identity exist on the web, in chat avatars, among weblogs, web page postings and other digital media, and thereby create numerous digiSelves." Jenkins supports this and states "Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires also flow across media channels. Being a lover or a mommy or a teacher occurs on multiple platforms." The possible ENVU avatar account that portrays this woman as a lover will probably have a completely different look than her Facebook account where she proudly displays pictures of her children, or the school networking site that she shares lesson plan ideas. What is disturbing about this concept is that although one may think they own or in full control of their digiLife, there has been no legal recourse establish to ownership, and thus once created it feels like your life is subject to open season to the government, savvy computer hackers or maybe just some high school student that's adept at programming. It's a vulnerable feeling, yet leading multiple digiLives can be addictive.

Jenkins states "Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and audiences." A great example our text gives of this concept was the author's inability to buy a cell phone that was just a phone. "On the other end of the spectrum, we may also be forced to deal with an escalation of functions within the same media appliance, functions that decrease the ability of that appliance to serve its original function, and so I can't get a cell phone that is just a phone." Demand drives the quality and content of our supply. When the salesperson said they no longer carried cell phones that only make and receive calls its because convergence has altered the way the end consumer processes information and communicates. We live in an age when people want the ability to communicate multiple ways from one device. With the right phone someone can be holding five or more conversations at once. Web enabled cell phones with text messaging allow users to hold simultaneous conversations by talking, texting, emailing (on multiple accounts), and instant messaging. This does not even include messaging via Facebook mobile. And so this media convergence has altered how we communicate and the number of people possibly in different parts of the world we may communicate with all at one time. Federman's take on this issue is similar "What is the culture of a place that is everywhere and nowhere, that is at once global but renders the globe obsolete, that globalizes the individual yet strips our individuality?"

Although I did find many of the concepts enlightening I did find one theory challenging. Federman states "It will not be long before we see the next phase of this evolution: theatres equipped so that patrons will actively engage in an online webgaming experience, while simultaneously watching the theatrical release of the film. The networked film-goer will simultaneously interact with the two entertainment media, and other audience members world-wide." This concept seems very far-fetched to me and I doubt that convergence will go to this extreme. Although we already see the motion picture industry collaborating with the gaming industry, I believe that watching a film fulfills a different need within a person at that time. Later when desiring to have interaction, then is when consumers will decide to play the game, but not at the same time. Additionally, although I agree with Jenkins that convergence is a process, not an endpoint, I do not agree that "There will be no single black box that controls the flow of media into our homes." I think products like the I-Phone are the first glimpse at this possibility.

The readings have prompted a couple of questions for me:

1) Will it ever be possible for the government to effectively monitor or regulate the internet and limit identity theft and fraud?
2) Will there always be a generational gap that will keep "obsolete" products around? Eg; Will some older people refuse to use a digital camera and thus a traditional camera and film always be around?